This is pretty cool. I don't think old episodes of Countdown have ever been repeated before, except for rare one-offs like the very first episode, and a handful of episodes in place of rained-off cricket over a decade ago.

If they're saying "60 episodes from 1991/92" my guess is that they're going to show Series 23. It would make sense for them to show an entire series rather than 60 randomly selected episodes from those two years. Series 23 was 65 episodes long though, so maybe 60 is approximate, or they've had to leave out five episodes for some reason.

Graeme, are there any contestants from that era who have also appeared in recent years (or have a namesake who has)? If so, it may be worth checking to see if they are the same person, as I don't think the wiki is entirely accurate in that respect. I'll probably remember the appearances of most 2011-14 contestants, while Robbo will have a good idea too.

Jack Worsley wrote:Graeme, are there any contestants from that era who have also appeared in recent years (or have a namesake who has)? If so, it may be worth checking to see if they are the same person, as I don't think the wiki is entirely accurate in that respect. I'll probably remember the appearances of most 2011-14 contestants, while Robbo will have a good idea too.

If we look at contestants who appeared in 1991-92 with the same name as contestants who appeared in 2010 onwards, there are some that we already know are the same person, according to the wiki: Eileen Taylor, Eric Emslie, Glen Webb, Gweni Sorokin, John Taylor, Peter Etherington, Simon Gillam and Terry Stapleton. In some of these cases we already know they were returning contestants, but I'm not sure how we know in the case of, say, John Taylor.

Barry Grossman, David Webb and Jackie McLeod all appeared in 1991-92 and then in the 30th Birthday Championship.

Contestants who appeared in 1991-92 with the same name as contestants from 2010 onwards who the wiki does not say are the same person (and hence have different player IDs in the database so are treated as separate people) are Bill Donaldson, David Smith (two of these since 2010) and Peter Wilson. In the case of unusual names like Gweni Sorokin we might decide "yeah, this is probably the same person" in the absence of any other information, but we can't really do the same with these very common names, which is why I'm wondering whether someone had extra knowledge about John Taylor to decide he was a repeat contestant.

An obvious limitation of this sort of analysis is that a contestant could have changed their name since their first appearance, for marriage or other reasons, in which case we might never realise they've appeared before. There are almost certainly unknown cases of this on the wiki, where the same person is recorded as two differently-named players, but there's not much we can do about it except correct it as and when someone in the know points it out.

Jack Worsley wrote:Graeme, are there any contestants from that era who have also appeared in recent years (or have a namesake who has)? If so, it may be worth checking to see if they are the same person, as I don't think the wiki is entirely accurate in that respect. I'll probably remember the appearances of most 2011-14 contestants, while Robbo will have a good idea too.

If we look at contestants who appeared in 1991-92 with the same name as contestants who appeared in 2010 onwards, there are some that we already know are the same person, according to the wiki: Eileen Taylor, Eric Emslie, Glen Webb, Gweni Sorokin, John Taylor, Peter Etherington, Simon Gillam and Terry Stapleton. In some of these cases we already know they were returning contestants, but I'm not sure how we know in the case of, say, John Taylor.

Barry Grossman, David Webb and Jackie McLeod all appeared in 1991-92 and then in the 30th Birthday Championship.

Contestants who appeared in 1991-92 with the same name as contestants from 2010 onwards who the wiki does not say are the same person (and hence have different player IDs in the database so are treated as separate people) are Bill Donaldson, David Smith (two of these since 2010) and Peter Wilson. In the case of unusual names like Gweni Sorokin we might decide "yeah, this is probably the same person" in the absence of any other information, but we can't really do the same with these very common names, which is why I'm wondering whether someone had extra knowledge about John Taylor to decide he was a repeat contestant.

An obvious limitation of this sort of analysis is that a contestant could have changed their name since their first appearance, for marriage or other reasons, in which case we might never realise they've appeared before. There are almost certainly unknown cases of this on the wiki, where the same person is recorded as two differently-named players, but there's not much we can do about it except correct it as and when someone in the know points it out.

So if I change my name I might be able to sneak back on? Awesome. Please refer to me only as Horatio Swank from now on.

Eoin Monaghan wrote:
He may not be liked on here, but you have to give some credit to Mark

Gavin Chipper wrote:
We certainly should do - at least with spoilers. Spoiler threads can be started by anyone but with the recaps we could just post extra details in the existing historic recaps if we pick anything up.

We already have the recaps, or have you forgotten about the work that I mostly did to recap them a few years ago...

So this was the first series to use the pencam and it also saw the introduction of the second conundrum in the event of a tie instead of a rematch which happened before.
It was also legal to pick only 2 vowels at this time. The champion sat next to the host and the challenger had first pick.
Er endings to one syllable adjectives were allowed if not specified too.
Don't think any of this counts as a spoiler

Where was I supposed to see that? Radio Times says 7 and they didn't mention immediately before or after last week's shows that they were changing times for this week. I don't check the Challenge website every day to make sure they aren't going to arbitrarily change their schedule so I'd have no reason to know. Where did you hear?

Where was I supposed to see that? Radio Times says 7 and they didn't mention immediately before or after last week's shows that they were changing times for this week. I don't check the Challenge website every day to make sure they aren't going to arbitrarily change their schedule so I'd have no reason to know. Where did you hear?

Are the repeats still on from 11am?

I heard on Facebook, first from Challenge's own page, then Michael Cullen mentioned it, and the adverts have now changed the time from 7pm to 4pm.